


three hundred eggs in a lifetime

by ghost_lingering



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Infidelity, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-23
Updated: 2009-06-23
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:10:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>female luna moths lay 100-300 eggs, 4-6 at a time, on the underside of leaves</p>
            </blockquote>





	three hundred eggs in a lifetime

**Author's Note:**

> this was started prior to book 7, so it's AUish after book 6, but not unrecognizably so

She doesn't quite know how it happened, but she lost her virginity when she was fifteen and reading between the lines of a book on the divan in the common room. Padma Patil had flopped down next to her in a near panic at a transfiguration exam.

"I'm going to fail," Padma said, hyperventilating, "I'm going to fail and then I'll have to drop out of Hogwarts and I'll never get a job. I'll be the Ravenclaw drop-out."

Padma was wide-eyed and twisted a nervous hand in Luna's hair which floated with static electricity all around her. Luna leaned over and kissed Padma's mouth, then stripped off her own top and rucked up Padma's skirt and wrapped a hand under her leg and dragged a thumb over her clit. Padma was breathing shallowly, mouthing her class notes, as she reached up and put her hands flat against Luna's back.

"Tell me," Luna said, pushing Padma against the armrest, then licking the insides of her thighs, and Padma took a shaky breath and was able, in stuttering gulps, to recite all 85 steps to becoming an animagus.

Luna's slept with, by her count, forty people since then, a handful dozens of times, most much less. She likes sex, and has thought she's fallen in love (though never for very long), but she doesn't want more than that. She spends her time traveling, seeking out new magical creatures, turning the Quibbler into a respected, peer-reviewed, magical science journal that even has a muggle off-shoot. She doesn't have time for partnership. She never knows how to respond to certain friends asking her why she doesn't date anyone, why she's not married, if she ever wants kids.

"But aren't you _lonely_?" Ginny asks her again and again, which isn't fair, Luna thinks, given the lack of sex in Ginny's marriage, given the lack of conversation. Ginny married Harry, but she didn't get him.

Luna didn't get Harry either: not first, finally, or even very long. There was one night back during the war when he was sad and feeling very noble for not dating Ginny that he kissed her and they had unsatisfying intercourse on bedbug sheets in a muggle motel with thin walls. Ron and Neville and Hermione and Ginny didn't say a thing the next morning, and they tracked down another horcrux by nightfall. Eventually, they stopped the world from ending.

When he married Ginny, Luna knew that by that point no one would get much of him, no matter whose finger he slipped the ring on. She slept with him several more times, even after he took his vows, because he was sad and sometimes drunk and she understood what it was like getting over one's childhood. But, by the end, he had stopped seeing magic and started just using it, so she dyed her hair and rolled up her sleeves and started rebuilding her father's press from the ground up. If she had to mark it, that's when she would mark when her real life began.

After Harry, Luna began going to muggle bars, and taking home men or women for the night, a weekend, two. She didn't go terribly often-too busy with the press-and sometimes when she did she stopped it after the groping and the drunken making out, because all she wanted was to know that she could find a body for her bed. She still calls some of them to get lunch or a beer. Andre, Cerny, Amira, Walter. They're nice, and it's not just about the sex: they don't treat her like a freak, and never have.

There were some wizards who shared her bed too: George every few weeks since his brother died; Gabrielle Delacour after Percy's wedding and then whenever they ran into each other at shared friends' events after that; Dean and Seamus, both at once, after a long night at the pub celebrating her journal's newfound critical success among scholars.

Luna never slept with Neville, but at eighteen he had been the one she came to looking after a plant to rid her of Harry's child, the one she came to for the plants to prevent it from happening again. She would have maybe pressed for more, but she once caught him with Ginny behind his greenhouse, her fingers in his hair, one of them still wearing Harry's ring. It's why she never felt guilty sleeping with Harry while he was married. She doesn't know how Neville feels, except that Ginny says he still kisses her like it might be the last one she lets him have.

When Luna accidentally slept with Draco it was years after she'd stopped sharing Harry's bed on the weekends. She and Draco were both a bit drunk at the time. She knew his story: he had been a Death Eater, and then wasn't because he went about it all wrong and wasn't any good; he had been in the Order, but then wasn't because he went about that all wrong too; he had become a journalist, but he couldn't even be unbiased enough for the Daily Prophet so they made him into an advice columnist instead.

They fucked in a hotel after the second night of the first International Wizarding Media Conference. It was held in Tokyo. He called her father's paper a 'two bit joke of a faux news rag' as she braced herself again the headboard. When she made him keen later by pressing her fingers behind his balls while biting at his jaw, she told him that 'the boy who lived liked that too.'

The next morning when she was perched on the edge of the messy bed, almost all dressed and putting on her shoes, she turned back and looked at his still naked body, smoking, as he said: "You should write a tell all compairing dick size."

She leaned over and kissed the closest part of his arm before grabbing her purse. "You're better," she told him, but he wouldn't look her in the eye.

They don't talk, or exchange Christmas cards, or anything, but sometimes an owl will come to her window with a particularly odd article from any old paper around the world and she'll smile and dig in her pile of clippings to send an equally odd article back.

The only other wizard she sometimes thought she might have slept with was Professor Snape, because after the war she saw Snape one more time before he 'died'; he came to her, one of Harry Potter's gang, the only one unpredictable enough to help him. He had been drunk and she felt a bit of pity for him, but, mostly, the only thing she could think of was how, in third year, two Hufflepuffs had been caught kissing outside the potions class and Snape had given them detention. Rumor was after it they never spoke to each other again, the whispers behind their backs shouting _queer_, shouting _faggot_.

"Are you a shirt-lifter?" she'd asked him, squeezing the last ingredient for the Permanent Polyjuice Charm into the culdron, as he downed another glass of firewhiskey. "I've always wondered."

He'd slurred his answer on his way to sleep, and, the next morning, he was gone before she woke up. She's slept with many men and women since then. For every one she looks and wonders how their face has changed, magic, muggle, both. She doesn't think he's shared her bed, but she never saw his new face, so she'll never really know.

As a child her mother used to sing her _frere jacque_ and rock her back and forth, back and forth on their porch swing. She sings it to herself as she falls asleep, sometimes alone with her sheets while watching shadows on her ceiling, sometimes with her hands through Amira's hair, or her cheek over the the tattoo moving on the skin over George's heart, or with Gabrielle's arms around her and her eyes closed.


End file.
